Special Report: How Trump scored a big tax break for conserving a golf range
By Joseph Tanfani and Jaimi Dowdell
Reuters
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - When Donald Trump bought his seaside golf course in a wealthy Los Angeles suburb in 2002, he vowed to surround it with “some of the most beautiful houses in California. But the 261-acre property on the Palos Verdes Peninsula had a problem.
Geologists working for the city would not clear part of it for home-building because of unstable soil underlying the course, built on a landslide-prone bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
The denials infuriated Trump, who lobbied and litigated for eight years in a failed effort to reverse the geologists’ findings and secure development approvals, according to interviews with planners and geologists and a Reuters review of public records and court filings.